Monday, September 30, 2013

Homeland II

photo of Jean Bethke Elshtain: Kevin W. Weinstein/ Associated Press

“Jean Bethke Elshtain, a Guiding Light For Policy Makers After 9/11, Dies at 72,” was the headline of a recent obit (NYT, 8/15/13).
Elshtain was Laura Spellman Rockfeller professor of social and political ethics
at the University of Chicago. In Paul Vitello’s post-mortem she’s quoted as
saying “an image that crowds out many others in my mind is that of tens of
thousands fleeing New York City by foot. As I watched and wept, I recalled
something I had said many times in my classes on war: ‘Americans don’t have
living memories of what it means to flee acity in flames. Americans have not been horrified by refugees fleeing
burning cities.’ No more. Now we know.” There was a Battle of Britain. There
was D-Day. There was the bombing of Dresden. Atom bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but as a world power, with the exception of the 9/11
and the earlier World Trade Center bombing (and discounting, of course, the
Revolutionary and Civil Wars), modern day Americans, who are not in the
military, have remained curiously immune from the wars they have fought. But
Elshtain’s quote is prescient. Are we on the precipice of a whole new era in
which average Americans will be personally affected by world events? Will there
be new forms of cyber terror that will wreak havoc with the juggernaut of
American prosperity? Perhaps weather events like Sandy, that paralyzed the
Northeast last fall, shutting down major cities and leaving a massive path of
destruction in their wake, presage the kinds of Armageddon, Europeans and others have experienced in the great wars and which we will no longer be able to
excape.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.